I'm talking about the CIA waterboarding tapes, the ones that showed various jihad boys coming face to face with their fears.

The CIA destroyed the tapes and the Democrats are pretending to be aghast.

Here's the background. A bunch of religion-of-peace people flew some planes into some buildings in an effort to show us that we were infidels. This sparked outrage in the Muslim world. Tens of millions of people were deeply outraged that they didn't get chosen to be among the 19 martyrs.

So, in an effort to get a piece of the pie, they strapped on suicide vests and set out to do their religious duty.

This was highly undesirable to us, in large part because – unlike them – our lives don't suck and we'd just as soon stay alive as long as we can.

At any rate, we got ticked off at them – and we were still pretty mad about the planes-into-buildings thing – so we went to war with them. And we caught some of them. They all have complex, hard-to-pronounce names that sound like a camel having gas, so I won't type them here. But we caught some of them and decided to ask them some questions. The obvious ones – What does camel cheese taste like? Are you a man or a woman? -- came pretty easy.

The harder ones – Where's Osama Bin Laden? How do you know they're really virgins? -- took some doing.

Enter waterboarding. This is a practice in which the person being questioned is led in fairly convincing fashion to believe that they're drowning. It is neither pretty nor fun.

And we do it to thousands of people a year, and we have for a long time.

That's at various Special Forces training classes for our warriors. We take young American fire-eaters and give them a dose of how the other half lives. It's meant to teach them toughness and endurance, to prepare them in case they are ever taken prisoner.

We've also done it two or three times to jihad boys who needed a little confession to cleanse the soul.

That's what got videotaped.

At a couple of sessions in which recalcitrant jihad boys were made to see the error of their ways, somebody had the video camera rolling.

This is not smart.

And along the way someone realized that. They realized that not only did they not have signed model releases, they might be getting into some bad P.R. problems.

So they stopped taping, and they noised it abroad in the Executive Branch.

And Harriet Myers told them they shouldn't erase the tapes. Of course, this is the same Harriet Myers who President Bush tried to appoint to the Supreme Court. She was rejected for being an idiot.

At any rate, the CIA was left in the lurch about these tapes.

But all uncertainty went away about 2005. That's when another U.S. government art project – The Abu Ghraib Experience – debuted on Al Jazeera.

That was decidedly ungood. The pictures show a whole lot of negative things that promptly had jihad boys targeting American troops and religion-of-peace people trampling one another to death in massive protests.

In the Abu Ghraib photos, a variety of jihad boys pose on buckets or near barking dogs or at the end of a leash held by the ugliest woman we could find in America. Though the photos showed no one actually getting hurt – none of them was injured, though some of them did crap their pants – they caused quite a bit of ruckus. It was supposedly the worst thing since the Killing Fields.

At least to hear the Democrats, activists and foreigners talk about it.

And as that mess unfolded smart people at the CIA kind of decided that it would be a good idea if the video of the waterboarding went away.

Which really was a good idea.

Because sure as shooting, if some Democrat or activist got their hands on the waterboarding video, they would YouTube it in a heartbeat, which would really light the fire under anyone predisposed to hate our guts. Think about it. Could you imagine the outcry if video turned up of Americans doing what Senate Democrats insist is torture?

Yeah, that would get ugly quick.

So it went bye bye.

And that deeply, deeply disappointed Democrats. Because there's nothing they like better than embarrassing our country, especially if they can get political gain out of it. They were really hacked off that they couldn't put waterboarding video in the Hillary-Barack '08 commercials and so they want a special prosecutor.

To Democrats, the way to enhance American security at home and prestige abroad is to say the word “waterboarding” seven or eight thousand times a day. If they don't want more Americans in body bags they better change their tune. Interestingly, they seem disappointed in the surge at the same time they are banging the drums about Americans supposedly torturing jihad boys. Sometimes you get the feeling that the Democrats and their activist friends are cheerleaders for the other side. Seriously, the imams don't need to fan the flames of anti-American hatred, they've got the Democrats and the evening news to do that.

And the CIA decided not to give them ammunition.

So the video went away.

Exactly as it should have.

Anyone who let that video get into the public domain might just as well have started slitting American throats themselves. Keeping it from ever seeing the light off day protected American interests and American lives.

The CIA destroyed the tapes because they're patriots.

And the Democrats are criticizing it because they're, well, you can decide for yourself what they are.